


Change of Heart

by vials



Category: The Honourable Schoolboy - John Le Carré
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-04 04:02:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10982961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: Something inexplicable unfolds after Fawn kills Jerry Westerby, ending with a gunshot wound and a fall into Soviet hands. Alone in enemy territory, Fawn has plenty of time to make up his own mind about what happened, and his conclusion leads him right to Karla.





	Change of Heart

As Fawn understood it, they had thought he was dead at first. By all means he probably should have been. It was difficult enough to survive a gunshot wound at point-blank, but to then survive a fall from a helicopter and landing in the ocean was something else entirely. Apparently something had been working in his favour, because rather than dragging him down and out to sea, the waves had pushed him towards the shore and beached him far enough on the coarse sand that even lying face mostly down, his cheek and lips pressed up against the grit, Fawn had neither drowned nor inhaled enough water to do any serious damage to his lungs in the hours he had spent laying there, unconscious. 

When he had woken up, he wouldn’t have been able to do much about his situation even if it had been crucial to his survival. The pain that gripped him the second consciousness returned to him was unlike anything Fawn had ever experienced before, and it was too much to work with even for him. It was a shock for him to realise, because he was used to the bragging rights that came from his level of pain tolerance and endurance, and he had pushed himself through many injuries that would have incapacitated most people before. This time there was no compromise: his body refused to work with him, only focused on the waves of fire that coursed through him at every slight movement, perceived or otherwise. It was all Fawn could do to breathe, and each time he did so his back and ribs almost blinded him with agony. He tried to work out where the bullet had hit him but the pain was too great and too widespread for him to be able to narrow it down any further than somewhere in his chest, so how the hell he was alive he would never know. It took him close to an hour to remember that he had been in a helicopter when it had happened and he definitely wasn’t now, but he wouldn’t know that he had fallen from it until months later, when he was informed of the fact in Moscow. He would also find out later just how lucky he was to be alive: lying on the beach and only focused on taking one breath after the other, Fawn had no idea that he had shattered several ribs in the fall, or that the impact of hitting the water had shattered his left ankle, and, travelling up the length of his leg, also played havoc with the tendons and bones in his knee. He would be told later that surprisingly that had been the best case scenario; he had evidently entered the water almost vertically, with that leg straight and the other curled – if he had been leaning even slightly further back the impact would have shattered his spine instead, slightly further forward and it would have caused catastrophic internal injuries. Fawn was alive out of sheer luck, though it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time. 

After that the details got hazy. Fawn had no idea how had come to leave that beach, though looking back from his current situation he had a decent guess. He had recovered in several hospitals, each as unpleasant as the last, and then once he had recovered enough that his new associates were confident he would live, he was thrown into prison so he could almost die again. By that point it had become fairly clear what had happened: he had ended up in Soviet hands, who had found him at the scene of a disastrous operation, and considering the only other British operative in the immediate area was dead, it was Fawn who had all the answers. Fawn, understandably annoyed at his new position, had told them only one thing – that he had been the one to shoot Jerry Westerby, but then he clammed up and refused to tell them why, or anything else for that matter. 

The beatings were particularly unpleasant given everything he had to worry about – his ankle was still badly broken and he couldn’t walk on it, the bullet wound had been seen to but the ribs were still broken, as were several on his other side, and a bullet couldn’t simply rip through a portion of one’s body without causing problems. Fawn learned that part of his lung had been removed, which explained why he so quickly got out of breath. The rest of his aches and pains couldn’t be narrowed down, but Fawn suspected it had a little something to do with falling out of a helicopter. When he added the beatings, the sleep deprivation, the long interrogations that could last up to twelve hours at a time, and all of the various techniques employed during them, he wondered how he was still alive.

Fawn had always been very good at withstanding interrogation, and as a result of this he had plenty of time to think. It was apparent that nobody would come for him, but Fawn wasn’t surprised. He had remembered enough about the incident to know exactly who it was who had shot him, and the conclusions he had been forced to draw from such information were unpleasant. Fawn wasn’t holding out because of loyalty – it was more to prove a point, so that when he did decide to make his move, his captors would be certain that he would stick by what he wanted, and they would know that should they refuse to meet him halfway, he had absolutely nothing to fear from them. 

He started throwing them scraps after a few weeks, little bits of communication here and there that never went anywhere. And of course, he started to put a concentrated effort into unnerving them, which wasn’t difficult. Fawn had learned quickly that people were most unnerved not when they were caught off guard, but when they were kept that way. Trained interrogators could recover from an obvious shock, but even the best couldn’t quite put their finger on what made them so uneasy about Fawn. He had always been good at unnerving people, and while it wasn’t a significant change, he did detect that the beatings, when they came, never lasted for as long as they used to. Fawn supposed they had grown tired of the way he would react with giggles and yawns, but it was the only reaction they got out of him these days: nothing else seemed to get to him. 

“You are a man who does not care,” someone said to him one day, frowning in disdain. Fawn recognised him only because he was around most often, hovering in the background: he hadn’t actually done anything to Fawn himself, despite deliver the occasional comment such as this. “Something in you just does not care now. Are you broken? Perhaps your brain was injured in that fall.”

“No,” Fawn said, surprising him both by answering and by doing so in Russian. The man smiled, seeming genuinely amused. He looked a bit like a vampire when he smiled, Fawn thought – a widow’s arch in his black hair, which was slicked back out of his face, and teeth that were slightly too sharp, a mouth that stretched slightly too big when he smiled as though to deliberately show his teeth. A Russian vampire, Fawn thought. He supposed Vlad was an appropriate nickname.

“Is that just a one-off?” he asked, now speaking Russian. “Or have you been hiding this from us the whole time?”

“It didn’t come up,” Fawn replied, and Vlad laughed.

“You should have said sooner! We might have been more careful about what we said around you. Or was that your plan?”

“No plan,” Fawn said. “You never said anything interesting anyway. Apart from what happened to me. But I would have probably guessed.”

“What do you think of all that?” Vlad asked, and Fawn gave a small shrug. His shoulders ached; his arms were tied behind him, fastened to the chair he was sitting on. 

“I don’t like it,” he said. 

“I’m sure you don’t. Your own side shot you! Why is that?”

“I don’t think they liked me very much,” Fawn said, deliberately ensuring that his bitterness seeped into every word. “But that’s alright. I can live with it.”

“Well, don’t you think that poses a bit of a problem for you?” Vlad asked, his voice almost comically sympathetic; he was playing it up, speaking as though he were addressing a child, and Fawn filed away the frustration for use at a later date. “I mean, you’re here, with us, and they’re obviously not going to trade anyone for you. They don’t even know you’re here. I’m sure they think you’re dead, after an injury and a fall like that, and you can hardly blame them. So why are you being so stubborn? You don’t owe anything to them, and they betrayed you! You could still have a good life for yourself, if you like. You don’t have to die in here.”

“I know,” Fawn said, sniffing, and clammed up again.

It worked, and while the beatings and mistreatment didn’t stop, the focus seemed to be on getting Fawn in a talking mood again. He got some advantages from it, too – occasionally he was given something substantial and even nice to eat, and he was allowed to sleep on a more regular basis. Fawn kept them on the edge, making small talk and letting it move to meatier subjects, saying a few things here and there as though having a moral crisis. They kept him busy with thoughts about how it wasn’t _really_ treason, not if they had abandoned him, and that surely by now he owed his loyalty to himself, but truth be told Fawn had never really been loyal to anything apart from individuals, and he couldn’t give a damn about Britain or the war on communism or any of it. He had done the job because he had been good at it, and because it had enabled him to be himself without coming into much difficulty. He had liked the dirty work, he had liked the bastards he had hung out with, and above all he had liked how he had been given his instructions, messy though they were, and then left the hell alone. Nobody expected an explanation from a scalphunter. People had liked to leave Brixton to its own devices, and Fawn had liked that. He could probably recreate it anywhere. 

No, he didn’t need to be persuaded. He just needed to ensure that these people didn’t think he was a pushover, and that they would take him to be a man of his word.

“I think you are starting to play us,” Vlad told him one day, which had been what Fawn had been waiting for.

“I don’t think so,” he said simply.

“You don’t?”

“No. I didn’t know we were playing a game.”

Vlad laughed. “Of course you didn’t. Do you even realise you’re thinking it?”

“Thinking what?”

“That you might want to cooperate?”

“I know that.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you say so earlier?”

Vlad had brought him bread and sausage and cheese and vodka, and Fawn was making good headway through it as they spoke. He finished a large mouthful and looked up at the other man, who was significantly taller than him even when they were seated.

“Because I have a specific request,” he said, seeing Vlad’s eyebrow raise slightly. “And I didn’t know whether or not he would be worth asking.”

“I won’t lie and say that everything is possible, but I can say we will make a good effort,” Vlad said, and Fawn gave a small smile, one of his unnerving ones, one that always made people in the room assume Fawn knew something they didn’t – or a lot that they didn’t, in this case. 

“I want to speak to Karla,” Fawn said simply, and busied himself with the food while Vlad did an admittedly impressive job of not registering much of the shock he was feeling.

“You would like to speak to Karla,” he repeated, as though he feared there had been some mix-up due to language. 

“Yes,” Fawn said, just as simply.

“I have to inquire _why_ ,” Vlad said, and Fawn looked at him again. 

“The things I want to talk about are specifically relevant to him,” he said. “I think he would benefit from hearing it all first hand. I understand we know a few of the same people.”

“That’s quite the statement to make,” Vlad said, and Fawn gave him one of his smiles, the one that made something even in Vlad’s eyes register unease. 

“A gamble,” he said, and Vlad stared at him, waiting for him to elaborate. “You’re wondering if it’s a fluke, or if you have something good here. But think about your own logic.” Fawn shrugged, one of his shoulders aching as he did so. “You’ve told me many times that I have nothing to lose. That I’m out here and I don’t have a friend in the world. Well, don’t you know I already know that? What would I gain from faking this? For wasting your time?” A pause, and then Fawn let Vlad have a little bit of apparent loyalty, some tiny seed of gratitude that might germinate into full-blown loyalty if Vlad was hopeful enough. “You’ve been relatively decent to me these last few weeks. Some of the guards, not so much, but it can’t be helped. I have been beaten up before, it’s no big deal. But I would be an idiot to throw away any of this treatment with a stupid lie, especially if said lie inconvenienced one of your most important operatives.”

“How much do you know about Karla?” Vlad asked, leaning back in his chair.

“A lot of it is hearsay,” Fawn admitted. “He’s a bit of a legend in Britain, I’m sure you’ll be amused to hear. You can pass that along to him. There’s all kinds of rumours, all of them probably based in a grain of truth, but how big those grains are is anybody’s guess. But I know one thing for a fact, and that’s that he and my old boss go way back.”

“And who is your old boss?”

Fawn sniffed, glaring off to the side for a moment with no theatrics at all. He was still bitter about the whole thing. This would mark the first time since it had happened that he had ever acknowledged the person he had worked so closely with for all that time, and he wasn’t going to lie and act like it didn’t sting. Really, it would work to his advantage. If he was going to play the bitter traitor, he had better put on a good act. How much of it was an act was still anybody’s guess, but it was best to start as he meant to go on.

“Well?” Vlad asked, and Fawn dragged his attention back to him.

“George Smiley,” he said, spitting the name out quickly as though if he did it fast enough he would be able to forget about him quicker. “I’m sure Karla’s heard of him.”

“I’m sure he has,” Vlad said, thoughtfully, and privately Fawn thought he had probably secured a meeting for himself. 

When he finally did see Karla, he was strangely pleased to see that the man looked almost exactly how Fawn had pictured him. The grainy picture that had had pride of place in Smiley’s office hadn’t done much for detail, and evidently it was a few years old now because Karla’s dark hair was almost entirely grey, his olive skin slightly more cracked around the eyes, but everything else was the same. He was small, about the same size as Fawn, and was already smoking from the second Fawn laid eyes on him. His eyes were exactly how Smiley had described – dark but oddly jolly, which was incredibly strange, because privately Fawn had doubted that part of the description and had assumed that odd lighting had put a glint in his eye where there was none. He didn’t know how somebody like Karla could have eyes that were anything other than cold, but while Fawn imagined he could make them look such a way it didn’t seem to be his default expression. If Fawn could describe him as anything, he would have to agree with Smiley – priestly, or maybe the friendly uncle who also happened to be a priest. 

Fawn had a flickering moment where he wondered how anybody could possibly be afraid of Karla, but then he remembered that people were afraid of _him_ , despite his small size and equally small frame, and he supposed that whatever it was, Karla must have proven it time and time again, to everybody. Indeed he dominated the entire room, despite the presence of Vlad – a full foot taller than him – and two guards who were a head taller and at least twice as thick. 

Despite never feeling intimidated by anyone in his life, Fawn had thought he might feel a flicker of it with Karla. He was pleased to see that he didn’t.

“They told me you were small,” he said, and Karla slowly blew smoke out and gave a small smile.

“They told me the same about you. You are comfortable in Russian?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Karla took a final drag on the cigarette and stubbed it out, and then came around the desk to lean against the front of it instead. Fawn never liked to be seated while everyone else was standing, but he thought he could probably deal with it now – it had been the usual fare these last few months, and he knew that the worst they would do to him would be beat him. Anyway, there wasn’t a serious height difference between himself and Karla even like this; Fawn thought they probably would be the same height if he stood up, with maybe an inch in it at the most. 

“Clear some things up for me,” Karla said, after a long pause. “You killed an operative of the British Secret Service, yes?”

“Yes.”

“What was this man’s name?”

“Gerald Westerby.”

“I see. He was the Circus’s man in Hong Kong, yes?”

“He was. He fucked that up for himself.”

“He was trying to warn Drake Ko of the plot to arrest his brother Nelson, or so I have been told.”

“Did Ko tell you that?”

“He might have, he might not. That is not important. What is important is if that information is correct.”

“I didn’t speak to him immediately before I killed him,” Fawn said. “But looking at everything that was going on, that’s what happened. He got it in his head he was in love with a girl. Drake Ko’s girl.”

“Liese,” Karla said, lighting up another cigarette. “A pretty young woman, but a bad choice. It must have complicated things.”

“I don’t know what was going through his head,” Fawn said, sniffing angrily. “He fucked everything up. I knew he would. He was a nutcase, but Smiley had to ask him because there was no one left to do it.”

“Things are running a little thin on the ground at the Circus, are they?” Karla asked, with the slightest ghost of an amused smile. 

“Even _thin_ would be being generous,” Fawn said, and Karla took a satisfied drag from his cigarette.

“So why did you kill him?” he eventually asked. “It doesn’t add up with what you’re saying here. It looks to me like you were trying to prevent him from telling Drake anything, though admittedly by then it was too late. Or perhaps you were on your way and arrived too late to prevent him, so you executed him as a traitor to save yourself the hassle of clearing up the mess? Either way, it certainly doesn’t look like the actions of a person on our side, or proclaiming to want to be on our side.”

“It wasn’t anything to do with the job,” Fawn said simply. There was a pause while his words sunk in, while new conclusions were drawn. 

“So it was personal,” Karla eventually said, and gave a small nod, as though the situation had a correct answer and Fawn had given it. “I see. I suppose a smart idea, to kill him in such circumstances. You would always have deniability. But that didn’t work, did it? I hear you were shot.”

“Yes.”

“By who?”

“Sam Collins,” Fawn said, practically spitting that name, too. “Another one who was out there. Another person Smiley shouldn’t have trusted as far as he could throw him, if you ask me. Collins is a sleaze.”

“I don’t suppose you know why he shot you?”

“I think it was a set-up.”

“Hmm.” Another drag on his cigarette. “Why?”

“Because you have to pay for everything in blood these days, don’t you?” Fawn asked angrily. “I don’t know what they were doing but I think the whole thing was intentional. After everything I did – I was nothing but loyal! And the thanks I get is a bullet in the back and a nice flight from a helicopter. The only reason I can think of that Smiley would have anything to do with that toad Collins is if they were in cahoots with something, and I don’t – I don’t appreciate that, I don’t want to stick by an operation that’s doomed from the beginning and say nothing, and just do my job, and get _this_ for it!”

Karla smoked calmly throughout, and Fawn, even through the heat suddenly rushing through him, wondered how he managed to stay so unfazed. He wondered how many other people he had seen lose their minds over something, either an impossible situation or something that was just too unfair to deal with. Fawn had never been one to really care about showing when he was angry, but even with this genuine lack of concern over how it made him look, there was something strange about doing it in front of Karla. The man looked as though he had never raised his voice in his life; he looked as though he didn’t need to. Fawn supposed that was why the quiet confidence around him seemed to infect everybody else; nobody doubted him. It cut a sharp contrast to Smiley, Fawn thought. Smiley still managed to hold a decent command, he still managed to inspire respect, but it didn’t seem a freely given compared to the way people gave respect to Karla. It was odd, Fawn thought, to consider the fact that these two men, really, were equally matched. 

“You feel let down,” Karla said. “Betrayed.”

Fawn didn’t say anything. It was too much to admit it out loud. It was something he was still coming to terms with himself. He could try and play everyone here as much as he could, he could try and twist things so he could be in a better position to work out what had happened, but none of that changed the fact that Karla would be able to read through it all and know that deep down, Fawn actually felt the things he was repressing so much. That Fawn might had exaggerated things, that he might be putting on a bit of an act for the benefit of the others, but that when it came down to it nobody did something like this of their own accord unless they really did believe in it. Karla knew it was part revenge. He knew it was part spite. Fawn wasn’t stupid enough to think that he had fooled Karla. But at the same time it probably worked to his advantage. After all, what were defectors – and that was what he was, like it or not – if they weren’t bitter? If they weren’t angry? If they weren’t spiteful?

And could he really call it defecting when he knew for a fact he would be stuck here anyway? Vlad had been right – it was about what was best for him now. If he didn’t cooperate he would end up either dead or rotting in a gulag somewhere. This was the much preferable option, especially when he remembered how Smiley and the others had hung him out to dry.

“You want to even the score a little,” Karla eventually said, nodding. “I understand that. Some of my best agents did what they did – or continue to do what they do – to even scores. It is what a war is all about, no? But you must understand that I am very good at this. I have plenty of people in plenty of places, and they are all very valuable to me. What’s more, most of them are still in their positions, defectors in place. Soviet citizens in enemy territory, risking their lives every day for the cause. I’m sure you understand that you would have to be in possession of very valuable information for you to even compare.”

“Do you want to know something truthfully?” Fawn asked, and Karla fixed his gaze on him, waiting as though he had all the time in the world. “The Circus is a mess. There’s barely anybody left who’s stuck with the sinking ship and despite the Chief’s best efforts, it’s still taking on water. You owe that to Bill Haydon.” 

A small smile from Karla. 

“An incredible man. A shame about the murder. The Circus was never good with keeping its deals, was it? I suppose such is the way.”

“Well, you have the comfort of knowing he did his job,” Fawn said. “The whole place is down on its knees. The Chief works around the clock, doing whatever he can. He lives in the office. He makes for an eccentric figure these days because he barely talks to anyone. He just delegates work, never really sees anyone, works all hours of the clock. He shuts himself in his office for days and he only lets one person in and out – his assistant and bodyguard and confidant of sorts, all in one. This person is the only one permitted to come and go as he pleases and he’s the one that spends almost twenty-four hours a day with the Chief. He sees everything that’s going on, and he has for a while. The Chief, I’m sure you’ve guessed, is Smiley, and that assistant is sitting right in front of you.”

Karla considered for a long moment, and then gave another small nod, stubbing out his cigarette. 

“You were very close to him,” he said eventually. “I imagine your current situation must sting all the more for it.”

“It’s the way the job goes,” Fawn said, through gritted teeth. “But I don’t have to be happy about it.”

“You feel no loyalty left for the man?”

“No,” Fawn said, not sure if he was lying or not, but choosing to believe he wasn’t.

“Very cold,” Karla said.

“You know how it is,” Fawn said bitterly. “I don’t appreciate being left for dead. I suppose it made me merciless.”

“Probably the best thing to be, in such a situation. Tell me, how do I know you haven’t been sent here on his behalf?” Karla asked conversationally. “It would make sense, don’t you think. It would be a risk, but it would be a clever one. To orchestrate something like this… and of course he could trust you, if you were his closest companion for so long.”

“I was shot and thrown out of a helicopter,” Fawn said simply. “I think that leaves too much to chance, and Smiley isn’t the sort to do that.”

“Could have been accidental,” Karla suggested. “You are unaware that that was part of the plan, you don’t feel like getting captured and subjected to the usual treatment. You struggle, the gun goes off. Worse things have happened to agents.”

“I still think it’s a little far fetched.”

“I suppose we will have to see. How do you feel about the cause? You do not strike me as a communist.”

“I’m not a capitalist, either.”

“You have no strong leanings?”

“No.”

“Well, no opinion is certainly better than the wrong one. Maybe you can be convinced.”

“Maybe,” Fawn said, not believing it.

“Your motivation is revenge, primarily.”

“Yes.”

“There have been worse motivations.”

“Money.”

Karla gave a small smile. “Exactly. Fawn is not your real name.”

“No.”

“What is?”

“I don’t have one.”

“I suppose we have that in common.”

They stared at one another for a moment, before Karla abruptly straightened up. As he ensured he had everything in his pockets Fawn caught a glimpse of the gold lighter and felt as though he was seeing proof of something that until that moment had only been legend. 

“I will assume you’re innocent until proven guilty for now,” Karla said. “Though I’m sure you understand that a lot of investigatory work will need to be done before you can be trusted. Until then you will stay here, but I trust my comrades will keep your presumed innocence in mind when they decide how to treat you.”

It was an order given subtly, without being a direct order, but Fawn knew it had been acknowledged. He felt relief and dread all in one: the sense that he had taken a step he couldn’t reverse. Perhaps most unnervingly of all, he found he didn’t want to. Not yet. He couldn’t be sure there would be a way to reverse such a thing, but the thought still gave him comfort.


End file.
